The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Courcelles (talk) 10:49, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Unidentified submerged object (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

This long-standing article has had numerous sourcing problems for a number of years. I just made a careful examination of possible sources written about this topic and found way too insufficient coverage to warrant an article on the subject. The article appears to have served, from time-to-time, as a coatrack for a website entitled "Water UFO", an originally researched list of UFO-incidents that may have involved water in some way, and an inappropriate conglomeration of trivia. One of the most reliable sources related to this article is a TIME magazine piece from Feb. 22, 1960 stating, rather whimsically, that every time naval appropriations is discussed in the Argentine Congress, an unidentified foreign submarine is reported to have been spotted in Argentine waters. "Unidentified submerged object" doesn't appear in the article. A search through Google scholar has uncovered almost no discussion of the term as a notable idea, and any mention of it at all is either a minor consideration or almost completely off-handed. Strictly speaking, I think we have a fringe subject not warranting inclusion. Note, for example, that the History Channel did a special on "Deep Sea UFOs" and did not call them "USOs". This is telling: even the pop-culture coverage of these ideas do not agree on collating them under this term.

We should include reports of UFO-like sightings associated with bodies of water (and under bodies of water) in articles on the UFO phenomenon, but a separate article on USOs is impossible to write given the paucity of sources which actually deal with the subject as written here at Wikipedia. Right now, this article is actually serving as a verification for the very existence of such a term: in effect, Wikipedia is being used to promote the idea that this is the way such objects should be labeled: [1] If there was ever a reason to delete an article, I think this is it. The last thing we need is for Wikipedia to become a primary source for paranormal entities. Let these concepts develop outside of Wikipedia and after third-party sources take notice THEN we should write the article. NOT before. ScienceApologist (talk) 19:07, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete should have been done long ago Weaponbb7 (talk) 19:29, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - there appear to be reliable sources under the terms "unidentified submersible objects" and "unidentified submarine objects". Are You The Cow Of Pain? (talk) 21:03, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Like what? ScienceApologist (talk) 22:43, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak keep, move to Unidentified submersible object, and then do a massive cleanup. This article is currently not very well written. SnottyWong ^confess 21:58, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • No indication that such a term is any more common than the one considered above. Compare [2] and [3] for example. ScienceApologist (talk) 22:37, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment This is a terrible article, but in looking around, I see that we have no general article (or even a category) for what would be referred to as "submarine incursions", which is what the Argentine incidents in 1958, 1959, and 1960 would properly be called. I have no use for stories about Australian banana farmers seeing something that might be a sub from another planet, but there have been numerous incidents of sovereign nations discovering something in their territorial waters. We have some articles, such as Soviet submarine S-363, but these are usually submerged in a dumb location like Category:Maritime incidents in 1981 where nobody will find them. Assuming that this article is deleted, the Argentine incursions (which were assumed to be by Soviet submarines, though the craft were never caught, so nothing was proven) would be lost. At the time, they were quite notable. Perhaps we can forget the alien fish people stuff and someone can take this in a new direction. Mandsford 22:21, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Submarine incursion would be a good article to write, indeed. I'm not convinced that the term "USO" is ever used in an official capacity, though, or has even been connected to these situations by any source except Wikipedia. ScienceApologist (talk) 22:35, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• If it goes in that direction, fine, but there does need to be some mention of the paranormal theory because it has been covered in reliable sources. Are You The Cow Of Pain? (talk) 23:28, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Such as? ScienceApologist (talk) 23:30, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• I suspect you'll just dismiss this, but Jerome Clark's book Unexplained has a chapter titled "Unidentified Submarine Objects". I think it's pretty objective, and provides a good general overview of the topic. If you have an Amazon account, you can read almost the entire entry. Zagalejo^^^ 05:49, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• There may be something useful here, although I can only see that snippet. Zagalejo^^^ 05:54, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Doesn't seem really developed enough for this to serve as the basis for an entire new article. This is the third name for this idea. That fact alone leads me to believe that it is probably too underdeveloped to deserve an article yet. Maybe in the future there will be increased interest in USOs, but until then I think they are essentially a footnote to UFo stories. The book chapter does not really look like an encyclopedic source to me for anything more than a sentence or two. ScienceApologist (talk) 03:36, 25 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete I don't see any serious coverage by reliable sources that warrants an article for Unidentified submerged object. If it is a nautical term it may deserve mention in submarine warfare or related article, and the alien angle could be mentioned in UFO or similar, provided they are backed up by good sources. - LuckyLouie (talk) 00:13, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Paranormal-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 22:40, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete The last two sentences of the nomination statement say it all. - 2/0 (cont.) 19:46, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.